AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Russell Berman

Russell Berman is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where he covers political news. He was previously a congressional reporter for The Hill and a Washington correspondent for The New York Sun.

February 13, 2018
Within the thousands of pages the White House transmitted to Congress on Monday morning as part of President Trump’s second annual budget request, there is a line that pretty much sums up the whole ritual. “Many of the eliminations and reductions in this volume reflect a continuation of policies proposed...

January 30, 2018
President Trump on Tuesday night will call for a $1 trillion infrastructure program, “fair” trade policies, a wall along the Southern border, a shift to merit-based immigration, a dramatic increase in military spending, and action to combat the national drug epidemic. If that all sounds a bit familiar, it’s because...

January 24, 2018
Vacuous and expensive. Pointless. Ineffective. Medieval. A non-starter. Over the last year, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has used each of those words, and many more, to denigrate the proposed Southern border wall that President Trump made a centerpiece of his campaign. Hamming it up on the Senate floor, Schumer...

January 21, 2018
FROM NEXTGOV
When the government shuts down, the politicians pipe up. No sooner had a midnight deadline passed without congressional action on a must-pass spending bill than lawmakers launched their time-honored competition over who gets the blame for their collective failure. The Senate floor became a staging ground for dueling speeches early...

January 20, 2018
When the government shuts down, the politicians pipe up. No sooner had a midnight deadline passed without congressional action on a must-pass spending bill than lawmakers launched their time-honored competition over who gets the blame for their collective failure. The Senate floor became a staging ground for dueling speeches early...

January 19, 2018
A government shutdown under Donald Trump might look very different from the one that occurred under Barack Obama. When conservatives in Congress refused to fund the government in 2013, among the first and most visible victims were tourists who had planned trips to national parks, museums, and monuments. Vacations were...

January 12, 2018
When President Trump offered his out-of-the-blue endorsement for the return of congressional earmarks on Tuesday, he broke the first rule of the hesitant House Republican bid to revive them: Don’t call them earmarks. “Our system lends itself to not getting things done, and I hear so much about earmarks—the old...

January 12, 2018
A bipartisan group of six senators say they’ve struck an “agreement in principle” on legislation to provide a path to citizenship to young undocumented immigrants while bolstering border security and making changes to the legal immigration system. Now they have to sell it—to a wide range of colleagues in the...

January 10, 2018
There was nothing more President Trump could have done to more clearly illustrate the vexing politics of the immigration debate or the often maddening way he manages Congress than the remarkable public meeting he held with lawmakers at the White House on Tuesday. The president convened a bipartisan group of...

January 9, 2018
Over the next several weeks, chances are that one of two things will happen in Washington: Either a Republican-controlled Congress will pass, and a Republican president will sign, the most significant changes to U.S. immigration law and border security in more than a decade, or the federal government will shut...